Achievement Unlocked: #Ravenclaw4life

The wand might choose the wizard, but the wizard chooses the House - the Sorting Hat just tells you what you already know. In my case, that house was always going to be Ravenclaw.

Observations:

The Harry Potter worlds at the Universal Studios theme parks are a totally cool immersive experience, but one that is even better if you do what the Japanese do and really participate in the theme.

The imperative to get in your house colours as soon as possible is even more of an imperative if you are at Universal Studios Japan, and don't speak any Japanese.

We spent almost our entire time at Universal in our respective house colours, the response from the locals was constant: they really appreciated us getting into the spirit of things like them, it also became a way to communicate - everyone working at Universal knows the Hogwarts lore, they know an appreciate the underlying personality types between the different houses - and they all had their favourites.

We even had staff members from other parts of the park remembering us on different days purely based on their interactions with us a Ravenclaw and Slytherin.

One of the really cool things about the Hogwarts houses is the houses are roughly based on four major motivations that inform personality types, and the colours and emblems of each house evoke those anyway. So you don't need to go through the official pottermore Sorting Hat, or even read the books or see the films - simply choosing the house you like is roughly equivalent to the Sorting Hat anyway since it only puts you in the house you choose...

I'm going to make a sweeping cultural generalisation and suggest that the Japanese "get" the purpose of the Hogwarts houses better than western audiences do. Unlike westerners, the Japanese don't seem to see different houses as simplistic good/bad terms, they see them as all being different sides of everyone. As such, they are much more willing to proudly identify with their house, which results in a much more diverse range. There's no house baggage here for the House Elves to clean up - there really were plenty of out and proud Slytherins and Hufflepuffs in full Hogwarts kit - there were even some Malfoy cosplayers doing the rounds complete with platinum blonde hair.

I'm not entirely confident you'd get the same experience in the US based Universal parks - but I could be wrong (till we go there...).

So if you are into Harry Potter, go to Univsersal Studios Japan, go straight to the Harry Potter part of the park and march straight to Dervish and Banges and pick out your house colours and wear them proudly for the duration of your visit - it's so much cooler.

If you have never read Harry Potter or seen the movies, go straight to the Harry Potter part of the park and march straight to Dervish and Banges and pick out the house colours you fancy most and wear them proudly for the duration of your visit - it's so much cooler.

Kaiju Collected: Quidditch attire (shirt, hoodie and scarf). Alas, there were no Ravenclaw beanies left :(Read more